Oh my, what is this? A whacky, rogue-like, dungeon-crawling pinball machine with RPG elements? I’m not going to lie, folks, I was pretty excited to give this a go as I love a good dungeon-crawling RPG, but the pinball element both threw and intrigued me. Brought to us by Wonderbelly Games, Roundguard looks pretty good. So is it actually an RPG? Is it as amazing as it sounds? Read on to find out…

Roundguard allows you to play as one of three characters that each have strengths and weaknesses backed by health, mana, and special abilities. You then proceed to earn coins per level to purchase upgrades, as well as finding new items and skills throughout the levels as you progress through the map route of your choice, defeating enemies that are equally adorable and dangerous.

Controls are pretty simple, with the only real variation being how to use the different abilities. You aim your pinball launcher, you press a button, you wait and see how the cookie crumbles, or in the case, how the character flies around until it sits uselessly on a cracked urn and you have no choice but to wait until it breaks. The abilities give this a little more interest, especially the Rogue’s ability to re-bounce in different directions, but not enough to really make up for the lack of real gameplay.

The graphics are pretty flat, as to be expected in a 2D pinball game. This is brought back up a little by the cute character drawings, but even these are limited by the size and shapes to suit the game. Nothing really exciting, but the narration by the little dude between rounds is cute as heck and always managed to make me giggle.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t have much in the way of longevity. It’s really easy to get over just watching your character bounce around the screen with minimal real interactions. After an hour or so, it gets really old, and you’re going to want to take a break. That being said, it’s probably cute enough to drag you back. Maybe you’ll jump back on every once and a while to see if you haven’t preemptively judged it.

The idea behind the game is solid, however, despite a plethora of cutesy characters and enemies, the end result was a game that was just too flat, and not exciting enough, also not big enough to warrant more than a few hours of gameplay every few weeks. Maybe a good starting game for the kids, but not something you’re going to dedicate hours to grind through.

Written by: HadesTheHobo